Was the Election Stolen

"There’s no clear evidence that voting machines were rigged or that ballots were altered, but as reported Tuesday night in New York magazine, a group of computer scientists and election lawyers has urged Clinton to call for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three swing states that Donald Trump won--to the surprise of just about every pollster, pundit, and journalist in America.

Clinton would have to win those states back in order to change the outcome of the election. And while it’s tempting to blame hackers, and not the failure of the political professional class, for Trump’s upset, experts warn not to get your hopes up for a shocking turnaround. For hackers to have changed the votes in three states would have been even more surprising than Trump’s victory.

“There is zero evidence of tampering right now. Zero,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The Daily Beast. The simpler explanation for why the vote deviated from expectations and historical trends was that Barack Obama wasn’t at the top of the ticket. The results for Clinton “only look off when you compare them to the Obama elections” in 2008 and 2012, Becker said.

The hackers would have had to begin their work in advance of the election. And in those states or counties that don’t use electronic voting machines exclusively, they’d probably have to be on the ground, infiltrating elections offices, and working up to Election Day if not on the day itself. Throwing the votes in these three states on the same day would have required teams of people working in coordination with a high risk that they’d get caught, Becker said.

“I don’t know how you’d plan for something like this even if you had George Clooney and Brad Pitt,” he said, referring to the Oceans movie franchise in which talented thieves pull of absurdly implausible heists.

Even one of the computer scientists reportedly urging Clinton to call for a recount seemed to downplay the notion that hackers stole the election for Trump.

“Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not,” J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, wrote in a post on Medium. “I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other.”